Indigent legal counsel plan has merit

Updated 4:55 pm, Friday, May 30, 2014

County commissioners recently voted to implement a public defender pilot program and seek a state grant to help launch the project. The program is a good idea, but it must be funded adequately.

County commissioners recently voted to implement a public defender pilot program and seek a state grant to help launch the project. The program is a good idea, but it must be funded adequately.

Photo: NICOLE FRUGE, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

Indigent legal counsel plan has merit

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

SAN ANTONIO — We are encouraged to see Bexar County moving forward to examine options for providing legal counsel for criminal defendants who cannot afford to hire a lawyer.

County commissioners recently voted to implement a public defender pilot program and seek a state grant to help launch the project.

Only County Court-at-Law Judge Scott Roberts — who presides over the county's mental health court docket and already has a public defender working with the defendants in those cases — has chosen to participate in the program. The county hopes to recruit more judges, including at the district court level, to become part of the experiment.

There has been no vocal opposition, but some judges express reservations. They fear inadequate staffing levels may result in problems with conflicts of interest, due process and adequate representation, prompting cases to be overturned on appeal.

Indigent trial costs have soared in Bexar County in the last decade. County records show $9.1 million was paid to lawyers who were assigned to represent indigent defendants in fiscal year 2013.

Concerns about the escalating costs are understandable, but the aim cannot simply be to contain costs. The focus must be finding the best way to ensure the constitutional right to legal counsel for the growing pool of indigent defendants.

Four years ago, commissioners appointed a group of Bexar County residents to study local indigent defense systems in response to an assessment by the Task Force on Indigent Defense in collaboration with the state Office of Court Administration.

In a 185-page report, the state task force reported that while Bexar County judges were doing many things right, some courts' methods for assigning lawyers were outside what the task force considered “fair, neutral and non-discriminatory.”

The local task force, headed by former St. Mary's School of Law dean Bill Piatt, spent a year reviewing the local system. Among the panel's final recommendations was a suggestion to explore a public defender system in which the county hired lawyers for the program or contracted with private lawyers to represent indigents.

A request for proposal on the project resulted in only one bid and it was not seriously considered. The matter was not pursued any further, and that is regrettable.

Bexar County has had success with public defender programs for appeals and for its mental health court, and there is no reason to think that it might not work on a larger scale.

The county's pilot program allows for collection of valuable data that can be used to determine if this is worth pursuing on a larger scale.

It has potential for success, and it should not be set up to fail by doing it on the cheap and in a haphazard way without input from the major players.